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This is the second and last part of my article about building a distributed monitoring solution with Nagios, you can find part 1 here

Central Configuration

Now you know all you need to know to set up service checks on the slaves and send information from the slaves to the master.

A benefit of a master/slave configuration is the ability to centrally configure all the Nagios nodes, both master and slaves. There are many ways to do this.

One of my favorite ways to manage distributed Nagios configuration is to use a version control system (VCS) such as Subversion. In this setup you store all the configurations under the VCS (which is a good practice anyway, to keep your configuration file with a version number and a change history). The various Nagios sites each have their own directories where they can put their files; I suggest a setup like this:Continue reading »

With Nagios, the leading open source infrastructure monitoring application, you can monitor your whole enterprise by using a distributed monitoring scheme in which local slave instances of Nagios perform monitoring tasks and report the results back to a single master. You manage all configuration, notification, and reporting from the master, while the slaves do all the work.

This design takes advantage of Nagios’s ability to utilize passive checks – that is, external applications or processes that send results back to Nagios. In a distributed configuration, these external applications are other instances of Nagios.